The Internet and the World Wide Web (“Web”) have changed the landscape of information delivery and affected numerous aspects of life. One benefit of this technological development is the ability to conduct business transactions globally via the Internet. As the volume of commerce conducted over the network continues to increase, collections of business units or organizations are working together to pool resources and expertise in order to achieve a common business objective. Organizations are sharing services and resources across enterprise boundaries in order to undertake collaborative projects that could not be undertaken individually or to offer composed services that could not be provided by individual organizations.
A growing array of workflow automation technologies has emerged to help organizations in a collaborative environment manage activities in the workflow process. In particular, workflow management applications are designed to electronically route the right information to the right participant at the right time. It enables the flow of work between participants within the same organization or different organizations to be defined and tracked.
However, workflow management with multi-participants can be very complex. Consequently, the integrity and security of the process can be compromised. For example, a workflow management may fail to define policies to ensure proper assignment of access privileges. This problem is further aggravated with new participants constantly joining the collaborative environment. Indeed, it can become difficult to verify the identity and access privileges of the participant. In some cases, a participant may trigger the execution activity, unintended or with malicious intentions. In addition, a privileged participant may activate an activity which is already executed or is not supposed to be activated. Consequently, the integrity of the workflow process may be greatly compromised.
As established above, there is an increasing need to manage workflow processes in such collaborative environments involving multi-participants. A secured cross-organizational workflow environment enables identification of privileged participants and enforces the control over the execution of activities.